CHENNAI: It’s been three years since that night in Mumbai which kept the whole of India awake. Millions watched ceaselessly in 2008 the news about how a group of militants wreaked havoc in the City of Dreams, leaving it blood-stained.
For Chennai-based fashion choreographer, Karun Raman, the sounds of gunshots that he and his friends heard outside the Oberoi Hotel in Nariman Point on 26/11, will never go away, he says.
“We were walking to the Oberoi for dinner around 9.30 pm. I still remember how we were laughing and joking as we approached the hotel,” he recalls. “And, then the shooting began,” he adds.
The rest was a haze of screaming and terror for Karun and his Russian dancer friends.
Karun had been a Bollywood dance choreographer in 2008 and was staying at the Ritz Carlton during that visit. Once the shots rang out, the group ran for cover and beat a hasty retreat to the hotel.
“The girls were so shell-shocked and they freaked out. As we watched the news about the terrorist attacks, we were even afraid that someone would burst into our room and begin attacking us,” he says of the morbid terror that engulfed them.
As the terrorists were snuffed out the day after, the post-mortem of the tragedy began in Mumbai. But for Karun’s group, it wasn’t till two days after that they gathered the nerve to come out into the open. “It took many months before I returned to Mumbai after that. It was traumatic,” he says.
Looking back, Karun feels that there is some justice that is missing. “Imagine the people who have lost family and friends,” he says sadly and adds, “Thankfully the scars have begun to heal, finally.”